The following is from “How Can You Have A Happy Life”, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 2013:
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From ancient times, such devoted men as Ezra, “a skilled copyist in the law of Moses,” exercised extreme care in order to preserve the text of the Scriptures. (Ezra 7:6) The Dead Sea Scrolls are an outstanding example of the success of their efforts. These scrolls were discovered in caves near Qumran, beginning in 1947. They include fragments of nearly all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Although the scrolls were written more than 2,000 years ago, they differ very little from one another and from the traditional Hebrew text in use today. “None of these variations affects the scriptural message itself,” notes Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Geza Vermes. Such accurate transmission provides evidence that our copies of the Scriptures faithfully represent the inspired originals.
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Exactly what did Geza Vermes write in the context cited by the Watchtower Society?
The following is from pages 38-40 of his book “The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls”
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The Qumran finds have also substantially altered our views concerning the text and canon of the Bible. The many medieval Hebrew scriptural manuscripts, representing the traditional or Masoretic text, are remarkable for their almost general uniformity. Compared to the often meaningful divergences between the traditional Hebrew text and its ancient Greek, Latin or Syriac translations, the few variant readings of the Masoretic Bible manuscripts, ignoring obvious scribal errors, mainly concern spelling.
By contrast, the Qumran scriptural scrolls, and especially the fragments, are characterized by extreme fluidity: they often differ not just from the customary wording but also, when the same book is attested by several manuscripts, among themselves. In fact, some of the fragments echo what later became the Masoretic text; others resemble the Hebrew underlying the Greek Septuagint; yet others recall the Samaritan Torah or Pentateuch, the only part of the Bible which the Jews of Samaria accepted as Scripture. Some Qumran fragments represent a mixture of these, or something altogether different. It should be noted, however, that none of these variations affects the scriptural message itself. In short, while largely echoing the contents of biblical books, Qumran has opened an entirely new era in the textual history of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Community’s attitude to the biblical canon, i.e. the list of books considered as Holy Writ, is less easy to define, as no such list of titles has survived. Canonical status may be presumed indirectly either from authoritative quotations or from theological commentary. As regards the latter, the caves have yielded various interpretative works on the Pentateuch (the Temple Scroll, reworked Pentateuch manuscripts, the Genesis Apocryphon and other commentaries on Genesis) and the Prophets (e.g. Isaiah, Habakkuk, Nahum, etc.), but only on the Psalms among the Writings, the third traditional division of the Jewish Bible. From the texts available in 1988, I collected over fifty examples of Bible citations which were used as proof in doctrinal expositions, thus indicating that they were thought to possess special religious or doctrinal importance.
On the other hand, the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 contains seven apocryphal poems, including chapter L1 of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, not annexed to, but interspersed among, the canonical hymns. This may be explained as a liturgical phenomenon, a collection of songs chanted during worship; but it may, and in my view probably does, mean that at Qumran the concept ‘Bible’ was still hazy, and the ‘canon’ open-ended, which would account for the remarkable freedom in the treatment of the text of Scripture by a community whose life was nevertheless wholly centred on the Bible.